Well, several days ago my 7-year-old daughter came back home having troubles with spelling her friend's name which is "Tina" and consists of just 5 letters. No matter how much effort she put into it, she always spelled it as "Max" or "Tina". And suddenly I got a fantastic idea – why don't I hide the word behind and let my kid play it using the Unlimited Wordle game? Yes, and I really started using this technique with all of my kids and I do it daily. Let me explain in details.
Why the Challenge a Friend feature is perfect for this
First, I want to clarify why this technique is perfect for these situations. This is because the wordleunlimited.dev website has this awesome feature called "Challenge a Friend" which is available in the Unlimited mode and allows you to enter the word between 4 to 7 letters and get a link from it. This feature was designed to let the friends play this game together, but nothing stops you from using it for your kids. You just enter the word, which is the name of our friend, get a shareable link, and give it to your child. The kid opens the link using my phone, sees the green tiles which show correctly placed letters, orange ones which show the letters which are correct but placed wrongly, and the gray tiles which show the wrong letters. Thus, the child learns the spelling based on these colors.
How I set it up in like 30 seconds
And here is the second reason – it takes only several seconds to set up the challenge. I just open the wordleunlimited.dev site in my phone, choose the Unlimited tab, go to the Challenge a Friend section, enter the name of the friend, leave the name field empty because the kids know where it comes from anyway, set the time limit to "None" for the younger kid and maybe 1 minute for the older one. I also switch on the "Allow hints" option because the kids are not ready to guess the word without them. And then I just click "Create challenge link", copy it to clipboard or send it directly to my phone or tablet which the kids usually use. The good thing is that there is absolutely no need to log in and even register the account, the information is not saved anywhere.
What actually happens when the kid starts guessing
And finally, it is time to explain what happens when my kid starts guessing the word. At the beginning of the game, the kids start with the random words, like "APPLE" which by coincidence contains the two letters that the secret word has at the beginning – P and A. They see that the letter P becomes green because this letter is the first one in both words. Then the letter A becomes orange because it is in Tina but not in the second position. I can definitely say that their brains start working intensively and after trying "PARTY" and seeing that P and A are now in the right positions they quickly narrow down the list. Usually, they guess the right spelling within the sixth attempt. That's when I realized that this is not just a game, but the great way to teach the phonics and letter positions. Schoolteachers would be really happy to have this kind of tool in their classroom.
The names that work best for beginners
It should be noticed that not all words are suitable for this exercise equally well. I learned it from the failed attempts to teach some longer names. So, 4 to 6 letters is just the perfect size of the word for such exercises. The names Emma, Jack, Lara, Rose, Mark, Luna, Ishaan work perfectly in this way. The names, which contain more than 6 letters may frustrate the kids because of the limited number of attempts and impossibility to find the strategy. On the other hand, the names with repeated letters like Anna or Neel work really well because kids learn that the yellow letter may become green in another place. I try to avoid names with unusual spelling or silent letters for the youngest kids because of the extra confusion. But now the 8-year-old plays with the 6-letter names and the six-year-old prefers 4-letter friend names.
Why this became a nightly ritual
To be honest, I did not plan to make this a nightly ritual, but somewhere in the second week my kids started to ask for this each day before the dinner time. "dad, whose name today?" is almost a new "What's for dinner". Sometimes I even allow the kids to choose the friend's name and challenge each other in this task. This technique is more efficient than all flashcards and those spelling apps which fill your screen with ads. Wordle Unlimited is free from ads, my kids learn to spell the 5-7 names per week. Roughly speaking, this means that the number of names is about 30 per month. And now I even go beyond the friend names and teach my kids to spell the names of cousins, teachers, and even family cat.
